As I have said a million times by now, there is a placename in Chinese historical sources, Sanfoqi 三佛齊, that in the early twentieth century, French scholar George Cœdès claimed indicated a place called “Srivijaya,” a polity supposedly based at Palembang on the island of Sumatra. As I have also said a million times, Sanfoqi […]

Off and on over the past few years, I have been researching about a place called “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊. This is a name that appears in Chinese sources from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, and it was clearly a very important trading center in Southeast Asia. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have believed that […]

I’ve recently published a working paper entitled “Revisiting the Chinese Sources on Early Southeast Asia.” I started looking at the Chinese sources for early Southeast Asian history a few years ago, and discovered a lot of problems with the ways that modern scholars have understood and written about those materials. In early 2022, I published […]

The scholarship on early Southeast Asian history that relies on Chinese sources is a complete mess. From the very beginning, scholars got a lot of things wrong, and then they just kept going and kept producing ever more flawed scholarship. By this point, the extant scholarship is simply unusable. If you want to learn about […]

Chinese historical sources have long been used to try to gain an understanding of early Southeast Asian history. However, when scholars have made use of these sources, they have usually done so without talking about the context in which that information is placed in Chinese historical sources. In other words, you see scholars talking about […]

I have recently been writing a lot about a place that I refer to as “Jāba,” a kingdom that I argue was based in the area of what is now Songkhla in southern Thailand and which from the fifth to fourteenth centuries was an important node in a trans-peninsular trade network. Recently, however, I came […]

By now I think that I have clearly established the fact that there was a kingdom located in the area of what is now Songkhla that was at the center of an important trans-peninsular trade network. I refer to this kingdom as “Jāba” (although it may have actually been called “Jāva”) and have found evidence […]

In 1810, two Vietnamese officials presented to Emperor Gia Long a map of the routes to, and within parts of, Siam with an accompanying text based on information they had acquired the previous year while on a diplomatic mission. Known as the Collected Records of the Routes in the Kingdom of Siam (Xiêm La quốc […]

In many recent posts, I have been writing about a place that I call “Jāba.” This was the center of a major trans-peninsular trade empire, and it was located around the area of what is now Songkhla in southern Thailand. This place is referred to in various historical sources by slightly different names, such as […]

In the eleventh century, a place in Southeast Asia called “Srivishaya” was attacked by a kingdom from southern India known as the Chola kingdom. We know about this from inscriptions in Sanskrit and Tamil that have been found in India. What we also know from these inscriptions is that prior to this attack there were […]